A No Mess Geek

I've built and reconfigured a lot of computers in my life. Installed and setup hundreds of operating systems and applications. Despite all this experience I sometimes want to dabble in something new without spending hours or days building, installing and configuring a system.

I recently came across mention of a CD-bootable, stand-alone, Linux distribution called KNOPPIX.

If you've heard about Linux and have an interest in seeing what all the fuss is about this might be a simple solution. This is one of several Linux distributions that don't require installation onto a hard disk. You just pop the CD into the drive, reboot your machine and you find yourself behind the wheel of Linux. When you're finished you just remove the CD, reboot again and you're back into your familiar Windows environment.

I was able to test drive many of the tools that compete with the Windows "ecosystem". There's the fast, and up-to-date, web browser Mozilla. The OpenOffice productivity suite seems to have more features than I need in a word processing or spreadsheet tool. If there's a Windows program you just must have you can test it with Wine to see if it works under Linux.

There are many fun applications and tools squeezed into the 700Mb CD.

The hardest part is burning the 700Mb .ISO file onto a CD. If you use a CD burning application it can probably create a CD from the.ISO ("Disk Image") file. You can even skip this step by spending a few dollars, usually $3-$7, and order it from a vendor. The KNOPPIX site provides links to a number of vendors.

With only one problem, my use of the KNOPPIX CD went well. I expected problems because I have a rather new motherboard and an even newer video card. The hardward auto-detection worked well. Except KNOPPIX was finding my hard drives but hanging while trying to read them. My primary machine does have a SATA RAID 0 (mirroring) hard drive setup. If that means nothing to you let say it's just a rather unusual configuration. A few minutes reading the KNOPPIX "cheat codes" gave me the command to avoid reading the hard drives and it booted smoothly.

Have fun, geek out. You might find yourself reading Slashdot everyday!